October 6, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

The Editor of Canada’s National Post recently asked me to write a feature. I promised them an article on social media, but once I started writing, it turned into something else. I had no choice, really. I call it “The End of Marketing.” It’s both dark and hopeful. I hope you like it.

They also invited me to discuss it in a live chat tomorrow (Wednesday October 7, 2009), with journalist Diane Francis and my Schulich colleague Eleanor Westney (who is presenting on the future of the corporation). The live chat is open to all participants. Yes, that means you!

Here is the link.

And, if that doesn’t work, just cut and paste this link: http://www.financialpost.com/executive/smart-shift/index.html

I hope to hear from you tomorrow!

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Economy and General Business Management, Conferences & Presentation, Marketing News & Insights, Word of Mouth Marketing, Branding | No Comments »

October 6, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

In a long-awaited, long-anticipated ruling that surprised no one who was watching, the FTC today decided to recognize the fact that bloggers and other social media types can be celebrities, that celebrities can be social media users, and that both can be paid endorsers without being acknowledged as such online (or off). Without providing any concrete details, the new guidelines legally require bloggers to clearly disclose any “material connection” to an advertiser, including giving actual payments or free samples for an endorsement. They also hold bloggers and others responsible for telling the (gasp!) truth about their product experiences.

Truth? Online? So those Pay-per-post types who get paid for mentioning a given product or service on their blog could, theoretically, be held to task for flogging those deluxe granite countertops that they don’t actually own? What about all the people on dating sites who hang out 20 year old pictures of themselves as how they really look? Can we fine each of them eleven grand?

After consulting with a range of marketing associations, including the WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, the FTC drafted their brand new rules for this brave new online world. WOMMA and many of the other word of mouth firms and groups have long had a code of ethics that encouraged member companies to encourage (but not always require) that bloggers and others reveal their endorsement type connection.

But I have to wonder whether this law means anything after all?

Is it really enforceable in the online space? With some many people posting so many things about so much, who is going to monitor it? What about anonymous ranking and ratings–still the bulk of online recommendations, I’d think. And if I post something about the great new and fresh Halloween Flavor of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, am I really going to be held to task for having tried and appreciated said yummy bits? Come on? Really? What if I just liked the sound of them? Or the color, or package? Is the FTC really interested in me that much?

And what about if I post that I hate a product? Is that automatically okay? Will this now unleash a firestorm of paid anti-blogging, where the competition can legally pay bloggers to diss every product but their own?

It’s a big scare, people. I’ll be surprised if many average people get stuck with cease and desists over this one. Maybe a few high-profile, large-scale cases, but that’ll be it. It seems pretty symbolic to me.

What do you lawyers think?

From where I stand as an online marketing researcher, something is definitely going on that prompted this action. Have no doubt about that. My student, Ron Ruslim, noted last night that positive reviews outweigh negative ones on the Internet by a ratio of 5-to-1. That’s just not realistic. And it goes against everything we know about offline word-of-mouth, where people talk a lot more about their negative, expectation-disconfirming experience than their positive ones.

Personally, I think the big perps in this space are the operators like Pay-per-post and their ilk, companies that try to get bloggers to post about products for money, or who hire shills to post falsely positive messages. Those companies, not the bloggers or individuals who get suckered by them, are the ones to go after. So why is the FTC seeming to target the little blogger instead? Are they? Maybe it’s all part of the scare.

My co-authors and I just completed a piece of research on word-of-mouth marketing that complicates this finding even more. In our study of the way that 90+ bloggers responded to a free promotional giveaway, we find that there are a number of ways that people react to the promotion. Most (but definitely not all) disclose their involvement. But the way that they do so can vary widely, and the effect on their audience base also varies widely. As a cultural phenomenon, it is considerably more complex than a simple statement of disclosure can be. Blogging is not TV or radio, where a few lines of legal disclaimer suffices. Blogging is an ongoing conversation, and (non)disclosures can happen in any of a million different ways. I”ll pass that research on to you readers in a little while.

So, while other news stories, like AdAge and YahooNews are trumpeting this as an event, you, oh Faithful Brandthroposophists now know what really happening. The FTC just wants to scare us into being a bit more careful about what we take from who, and why we do it.

But, really, this isn’t all that scary.

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Economy and General Business Management, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing News & Insights, Communities and Tribes, Branding | 3 Comments »

September 15, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

I’ve been pretty busy lately. My co-authors and I wrote an article for the Journal of Marketing on word-of-mouth marketing that breaks some exciting new ground (more on that soon–to be published in March 2010), I just taught a great 3-day seminar in Chicago on ethnographic research and innovation for Sony’s Global Marketing and Product Planning group (a superb group of people), my Sage Netnography book is in the final typeset proof stage and will be released in December, and I have another 15 research projects on the go. AND the baseball team I am coaching advanced to the semi-finals. Yeah!

To top it off, I started a new course yesterday on Social Media and Marketing. The course was initiated by Vanessa Barretto a wonderfully motivated and action-oriented Schulich MBA student who has been instrumental in pulling a classroom full of interested students together in less than a week. Amazing.

I thought I’d share the outline and some of the ideas with you. Here is the outline:

SOCIAL MEDIA AND MARKETING
MKTG 6900.030: Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto Canada

Online communities, social networking sites, blogging, and other interactive uses of information technology are changing the way people communicate and understand their world. Social media is changing society, and changing the nature of marketing.

An understanding of online communities and online WOM are critical for the marketers of today and tomorrow, who are trying to be heard in a mediascape cluttered with advertisements and drenched in consumer distrust. Companies are trying to discover how to speak to consumers in a way that is more authentic, and social media marketing are begin tried as an alternative to traditional marketing tactics. But how should it best be used? What are the rules for success? It’s all brand new and uncertain.

The purpose of this course is to introduce advanced Schulich MBA students to social media marketing as a method, and then to rapidly develop your skills as Social Media Marketing Strategists. In several classroom discussions led by the professor, students will learn about the theories and practices that inform this new set of marketing techniques, and will study numerous actual and ongoing social media marketing campaigns.

We will be using a reading package and online materials to conduct a ‘real-time’ learning experience that blends theory and practice and talk and action, as well as school and business. The course will also feature guest speakers.

Prof. Kozinets has been working in the area of social media marketing since 1995, when he began writing and speaking about these topics. He was a founding Advisory Board member of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. His book about online ethnography is coming out in December 2009, and his article on WOM Marketing in online communities will be published in the Journal of Marketing in March, 2010.

Specific topics include:
• Terminology issues: distinguishing the different types of social media and social media marketing campaigns
• Similarities and differences between new and traditional media, and between organic
and amplified WOM
• Overview of useful theories about social media and word-of-mouthn
• How networks of social influence work
• Marketing Metrics: Tracking online and offline word-of-mouth and influence
• Building social media marketing into strategy and tactics
• Ethical aspects and codes of the industry

The centerpiece of the course will be a practical assignment. In teams of 5, you will work with a company interested in engaging in a Social Media Marketing campaign and then design and refine this campaign over the 15 weeks of the course. Your mid-term assignment and final deliverables will be based upon this practical, applied assignment. There will be no exams.

The course is realistic, applied, intense, and demanding. By studying these developing, expanding cutting-edge techniques in detail and in a realistic corporate setting, it is expected that students will gain valuable knowledge, expertise and also make valuable connections with important companies and current industry players and firms.

As with all classes, attendance at discussions and participation in them is expected. We will also be sharing online material. The deliverables for the course will be two group assignments.

* * *

In our first class, yesterday, each student was assigned a book about the topic to summarize. Here are some of the books’ titles (easy to google or amazon them for more info):

1. Groundswell
2. Citizen Marketers
3. Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here.
4. Word-of-Mouth Marketing
5. Tribes
6. Beyond Buzz

I welcome your suggestions of new, relevant, and interesting books.

In the next class, students will be presenting their summaries of the books, and the marketing-relevant takeaways.

The questions we will collectively be seeking to answer over the next few weeks are:

1. What is social media? What are its characteristics? How does it relate or compare to other related terms like Internet Marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, and Web 2.0?
2. What is *not* social media? What does the definition exclude?
3. What kinds of social media are out there? What are their characteristics?
4. What marketing purposes are those different kinds of social media good and not good for? How do we know?

As always, I’d love to hear you comments and see your feedback on this new course.

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Academic Life, Technology, Communities and Tribes, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing News & Insights | 5 Comments »